Tag Archives: yarn

This pattern was created to make small felted bowls to hold various objects. I use it myself to hold the pieces for various board games. What will you use it for?

This bowl is formed of hdc, beginning at the center and working out, and finished with slip stitches around the edge. Because this project will be felted, it does not use the normal convention of 2 ch being equivalent to one hdc at the start of a row or round. While 2 ch is equivalent in height to one hdc, it is not equivalent in thickness, which matters when the object is to be felted. Instead, the beginning chains should be skipped as though working in the round in sc.

Round 1: ch 2, 8 hdc in loop. Join with sl st to first hdc.Round 2: ch 2, 2 hdc in each st. Join with sl st to first hdc. 16 hdc.Round 3: ch 2, *hdc in next hdc, 2 hdc in next hdc. Repeat from * around. Join with sl st to first hdc. 24 hdc.Round 4: ch 2, *hdc in next hdc, 2 hdc in next hdc, hdc in next hdc. Repeat from * around. Join with sl st to first hdc. 32 hdc.Round 5: ch 2, *hdc in next 2 hdc, 2 hdc in next hdc, hdc in next hdc. Repeat from * around. Join with sl st to first hdc. 40 hdc.Round 6: ch 2. Working into back loop and yo wrap of previous round (see image below), hdc in each hdc around.

After my previous dye experiment, I found myself wishing there was a way to get that progressive effect without needing to babysit the yarn all day long. I found inspiration for this second method in the appearance of my first ball once I’d wound it into a cake:

I know that yarn that is too tightly clumped together won’t absorb dye; that’s why normally when dyeing, you wind the yarn into a loose skein. The first time I ever dyed yarn, the skein had stripes where I’d tied it too tightly. But, I reasoned, what if I used that very capacity on purpose to produce a progressively dyed yarn? Since I still had 1/2 a skein of Patons Classic white left, plus some leftover green dye, I decided to experiment right then and there.

I wound the remaining Patons into a very tight ball on my ball winder, intentionally tensioning with my fingers to keep it small and tight, because I didn’t want dye to penetrate too quickly. Also in an effort not to allow too-quick penetration, I didn’t soak the yarn before dyeing. Finally, because I didn’t want to dye the top and bottom of the ball, I placed the ball on top of an upside-down saucer, and put another saucer on top. Be careful if you try this yourself–make sure your saucers can handle the heat. These are Longaberger saucers and are oven-safe, so I figured they’d be fine. This saucer-wrapped ball was placed in the crock pot and allowed to sit until… well I intended to go until the dye exhausted, but after two days, I was bored. Green dye takes forever to exhaust. I pulled it out and removed the saucers, and this is what I found. The top of the yarn looked like this (the green spot comes from the tail getting trapped there after it had had a bit of dye):

And the bottom looked like this:

Success! I hope? Had to wind it into a skein to make sure. Sure enough, as I skeined off the yarn, the dye went from very dark on the outside to lighter on the inside, and about the middle 40% remained pretty much natural. However, it’s also speckled, with less dye having been absorbed where two strands crossed each other. In my desire to wind it tight enough for this to work, I found, I’d actually wound it tighter than necessary! But it makes a very interesting effect, and now I’ll know that next time, I can try a looser wind.

Overall I’m really pleased with this method, especially the set-it-and-forget-it aspect. This method would also work great for hand-wound balls, because for that you wouldn’t even need the saucers, although it would also end up being more of a surprise because you wouldn’t be able to remove the saucer and see what was going on inside.

In the past few years, one thing I’ve really enjoyed doing is dyeing yarn using food-safe dye in my kitchen. I mostly use food coloring, though I’ve also done some work with Paas easter egg dye. Recently, I heard about Fresh from the Cauldron, and learned that the dyer there does some progressive dyes, that is, skeins that transition continuously from one color to another across the length of the skein. I don’t know how she does it, but I did know that I wanted to try for myself.

The first way I thought of to do it was to dye yarn and then pull out a little bit at a time, similar to the third method detailed in this article on food color dyeing from knitty.com. I’d done that before and it was pretty simple, but instead of winding a hank and pulling out parts of the hank, I would just pull out parts of the yarn. I started by coiling my yarn into my crock pot in the hopes that this would prevent tangling, which for the most part, it did. I got a few small tangles while I was pulling the yarn out, but not many, and they were all basically slip knots that came undone easily.

I decided that I wanted a blue yarn that transitioned to green, so I started out dyeing the yarn blue, and then added yellow. More yellow, I reasoned, would make the yarn more green. This turned out to be true, except that when my yellow dye was exhausted (after about 4 hours), I realized that the yarn was about as green as it was going to get. After that, I simply mixed some green dye so that I could end up with more of a forest green towards the end of the project.

Now, I said before that I started out inspired by that Knitty article, but wanting more gradual transitions between colors, I decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that I was going to pull out 1-2 yards of yarn every 5-10 minutes. For approximately 100 yards of yarn (50g of Patons Classic Wool), this ended up taking me nearly 8 hours. In order to prevent tangling and provide the yarn some space to dry, I wound it around my swift as I went. In the end, I had a ball of yarn that did transition from blue to green quite nicely.

I would do it differently if I did it again, however. For one, I don’t think it was necessary to move the yarn quite so often. 5-10 yards every 20 minutes would probably get a nice effect and require a lot less babysitting, though it would still require being home all day. More importantly, I dumped in all my yellow at once, trusting to time to keep it all from turning green, but I underestimated the speed of the transition and the yarn turned green very quickly, within the first half-hour. To get more blue blue-greens, I’d recommend starting with only a small portion of yellow dye and waiting for it all to be absorbed before adding more.

I am happy with how the yarn came out and I will definitely try this again, just hopefully with slightly less babysitting. I got a lot of cleaning done but not much else.